Comments on: Now you come to mention it, the launchpad logo could be a mitre

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:15:25 +0000

Good grief, that screenshot says it was taken on photon, which hasn’t been around for a while; the code’s probably backed up somewhere and I’ll dig it out later.

I hadn’t seen Tim Tyler was still working in the field, though I’m happy to see it. It was sad to see the squabbling between Bell and Braben.

I think you could consider the book, or at least writing a novel around it; did you ever read “Cybergypsies”, which was a didactic novel about MUDs on Prestel?

I have also considered a working up-to-date generalised Beeb emulator which can pull in games from the net as needed simply, for people who don’t know all the bells and whistles, but of course you’d need Acorn’s MOS and BASIC and DFS ROMs, and who the heck knows who has copyright over these any more?

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:28:13 +0000

Ah, can’t remember, was it this:

http://use.perl.org/~marnanel/journal/25852
http://marnanel.livejournal.com/610850.html

…? There’s a picture of some Perl + SDL code on one of these.

Repton and Elite (and one or two other games on the BBC/Electron) were out of this world. It’s a hugely exciting thing for me to find people doing remakes of these, and having a go myself.

I assume you’ve seen Tim Tyler’s http://www.rockz.co.uk/ – very good Java applet, I thought.

I’m half thinking about writing a book of some sort on these games, but who’d buy it?

My own efforts are coming along.. slowly. I did some Perl OpenGL stuff which was quite slow, though I don’t think Perl was to blame. C/C++ and SDL/OpenGL these days – when I get some time, that is!

There were other games: one called “Sim”, Sabre Wulf, Exile. If I was sad enough to write a top 10 list of my favourite games of all time (which I might be :) there’d be fierce competition from these…

Would be interested to see you’re efforts, I’ll put mine on

http://www.henrymcguinness.co.uk/

if they come to anything.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:47:22 +0000

Henry: Repton is one of my most favourite game ever. I’ve gone some way towards reimplementing it over the years in most things I’ve touched, from DOS text mode to the Palm to Java; I don’t recall directly doing it in Perl, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Where did you see that I had?

By: Henry

Henry — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:20:53 +0000

This is a really appalling place for me to post this. Couldn’t see how else to ask you this question.

I’m revisiting the BBC game Repton*, learning SDL, and taking a temporary break from Perl. But I was fascinated to see that you (I think) tried to write Repton in Perl? How did you fare? Can’t find much mention of it in Google, none on CPAN.

Be interested to hear how you got on.

* also Elite, different story though.